GLITCH
by RealityItch
Summary: Searching for a mysterious substance Arcee and Soundwave get accidently trapped in an old mine. They try to get out while the world starts to be somewhat different for them as they get hit by an unexpected change. Or is it just a glitch? [ATTENTION: The story has been moved and is now part of the DEPTH OF FIELD (chapters 1-3)]
1. Chapter 1 - Slenderbot

**Soundwave is a mysterious creep. "Slenderbot" they call him behind his back, both because he is actually slender and because he earned well this designation. He sneaks about everywhere and knows close to everything and he is next to impossible to smart out. He has loyal minions who are his eyes and ears. And he has no face wearing a black glass screen-mask instead. Contrary to his name he hardly ever talks at all - of choice as they say - not because he cannot, but why exactly - nobody really knows for sure. In fact nobody really knows too much about Soundwave. Gossip has it that in order to be more effective, he erased his emotions long time ago using an ancient secret script, not to lag his processor with unnecessary burdens and distractions. Those who know him and his level of pragmatism strongly believe it is true. That freaks everybot out even more than anything else about Soundwave.**

 **Arcee is secretly after a mysterious legendary substance that was reported to be found on some organic planets, including Earth. She finds a trace of its radiation in a cave system Autobots explored on another occasion some time ago. She decides to secretly come back and look it up. She believes it will take just a few clicks and then she can be safely back to base. The substance is known under a variety of names, the most popular "organicon" reference points to its alleged capability to make bots to develop some organic-developed features alien to mechanical beings such as Transformers. They say only femmes have the capability to detect it and she is the (almost) only femme around, so she prefers to grab it while Arachnid is still captive is their base or until anyone else finds out.**

 **Under suspicious circumstances the cave collapses on Arcee's head and under her feet, right about when the search starts to look promising. It is just a miracle that Arcee survives. Or not really a miracle?**

* * *

The third explosion was fatal. It blasted the rest of what remained of the collapsed corridor of the abandoned mine into pieces, tearing the underground passage apart and ripping a sufficient hole in the ground to swallow a multi-tonne monster. The stapling trashed like matchsticks under the crumbling stone weight. The fast moving rubble was tumbling down loudly smashing rocks against one another into a dark deep pit, dragging a violet-blue metal bundle to the freshly opened mouthpiece of the underworld. The curled up living creature was falling together with the rocks, her body hurt, torn, leaking, tumbling down with the stones, about to get smashed to the ground in a few seconds. Clutching at the moving walls in the whirlwind of chaos, her fingers failed her defeated by the overwhelming force of gravity that dragged everything else down with her. Still, with the last of her life instinct, she tried to free herself before the final slash of pain and effort streamed through her receptors and everything went black.

He saw it all. Not from a safe distance, but from a lower corridor, a footstep away from being smashed himself by the falling rocks tumbling down to the abyss beyond his feet. He was looking at her demise, registered the life-or-death struggle. It all lasted maybe a nanosecond but was sufficient for his system to generate proper calculations assuming probabilities, determining how much there was left till death would became apparent down in the well under his feet. He was observing. Putting just the right effort and only as much interest as was needed to achieve the optimum efficiency in getting one more Autobot out of the online world.

He had always been very economic. Not interested in glory or fame, as a matter of fact not interested in feedback at all. What mattered was the effect. Calm perfection. Precision. His own standards subject to his own assessment. The rest could well not exist. He was an optimization machine. An achiever. A calculated machine reaching objectives most efficiently, encased in a slender, elegant, strong and economic body that had exactly what he needed: strength, intellect, perception and endurance. No more and no less.

A technocrat.

Now he was standing there, hidden in the dark corner of an abandoned mine corridor watching in that very click as the rocks were tumbling down to crush her - a member of an enemy fraction, one that should disappear. Someone inferior...

And then it happened.

His system crashed.

An electric surge in the capacitors appeared out of nowhere. It felt like an innocent short-circuit, accompanied with a smell of overcharge and burned insulation. A nano-second of static flashed through his vision registering it as a moment of slowdown and profound silence, even though the world went further around him in the same speed. It was followed by a brief overload alert from his RAM suddenly flooded by his backup systems feeding him with an abrupt unexpected memory loop. Something glitched and he found himself inside the middle of a deja-vu, from which he could not get out.

It all went really slow as he was now watching, as if from the distance but still from inside his own eyes, a surreal scene with himself in the main role, one that he would never expect in his wildest dreams.

He saw how his tentacles extended in a millisecond to the full length tightly wrapping around her as she was falling through the pit right in front of him. In slow motion, he felt her weight dragging him down but his powerful stabilisers balanced it pushing him instinctively to the corridor behind, bringing the weight centre back. He locked himself with his wings against the walls beside him with full strength. Something cracked badly beside him but he ignored it. Immune to the hits of the falling stones, his tentacles dragged the blue-violet fainted creature to the corridor pulling her out of the tumbling rock cataclysm in the last moment before it would have smashed her and drag her to death in the underworld. In a brilliantly calculated way, as if prepared in advance. As if strategically deliberated, to choose just the optimum, fastest and least harmful option available.

As if he *planned* it.

The speed of the sudden movement and the power of the reversed thrust pushed them both back to the cave kicking him out of balance. Before he knew it, her unconscious body was lying over him entangled in the embrace of his tentacles - tightly wrapped around her slim but strong posture, now in ruin, bleeding energon on him, drop by drop.

Only then he noticed that his left wing was strangely twisted and he felt it burning with pain. But he was too shocked to understand fully what had just happened.

*Impossible*.

His mind choked, before he got the notion that it was *him* who had done this *himself* just now, against all his embedded policies, against any reason. How on Cybertron could he have done this *himself*? Save an Autobot?

The feeling of deja-vu persisted now only slightly, but still flickering somewhere in the subconsciousness, as if he saw all this happening before already, but he just could not place it.

Panic was not exactly what he knew well and the sensation took him as a shock. He physically felt the energon veins narrowing down for a moment and a powerful wave of tension and heat ran through his whole system up to the fingertips. At the same time he shivered with cold. He felt how his processor froze for a moment overwhelmed by the sudden emotion. As if, after the outburst of irrational action, he numbed into a trembling state of self-disgust wanting suddenly to get rid of it as soon as possible. This was fairly too much.

He needed to focus. It must have been a *glitch*. He scrolled back across the fresh memory, but the record only confirmed what he knew already. The picture was crystal clear and now he was lying with her, tied up together, thrust in a cavern that used to be a mine corridor now blocked by rocks released by the explosion. Trapped. And with it, one more thing came to light, something he almost forgot he could ever do.

He felt a *feeling*.

Not clear what it was exactly.

Rewind.

A set of feelings.

He panicked again for a nanoclick realizing that panic was also a feeling. A sudden reflex pressed his energon to a jump tension, speeding the system up beyond the safety levels for a second.

No way this was happening...

He registered her numb weight thrown over him by the thrust. She was somehow lighter than him, as slim and sleek, and also as strong... And he held her tight. Forcing himself to focus he pushed the tentacles' release protocol and they gave way loosing the grip. Set free, she rumbled to the side with an unpleasant grind of aching metal. He caught her in the last second with his wing and carefully placed on the ground next to him. She was unconscious.

A wave of stress pulled through him again. The cooling system sped up increasing ventilation capacity to stabilize the temperature. He looked at the his own wing and realized that it was strangely twisted and blotted in energon. Hastily he ran a scan registering his body status:

 _ ******hardware status report******_

 _ **function: spark:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: main processor network:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: enegon circulation:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: memory systems:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: locomotor system:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: cooling systems:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: electricity circuits and sensory networks:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: protoflesh:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: transformation cog**_ _: 100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: groundbride:**_ _access denied_  
 _ **function: external communications:**_ _access denied_  
 _ **function: geolocation:**_ _access denied_  
 _ **function: datacables connectivity:**_ _100% operational; no damage detected_  
 _ **function: self repair:**_ _deactivated  
_ _ **function: symbiont docking systems:**_ _100% operational, undocked_

 _[...]_

 _ *****no major damage detected*****_

What?

Nonsense. No sign of the injured wing in the readings. No energon spill or jump tension recorded. No cooling systems surges recorded. No nothing, but access denied to geolocation, groundbridge and comms. Were they too deep underground to run the geocomm functions? Unlikely. It worked perfectly down in many caves and mines before. Something must have been damaged but it was not clear what exactly.

Self repair inactive? Another glitch. His wing ached as hell, but the self-repair would not launch in line with the scan, even on a push. He tried to move it and he almost moaned in pain. He took a closer look to realise that it was probably broken in the joint. Energon was leaking and staining the ground below.

He leaned back for a moment and closed his optics. He repeated the scan, which returned the same "normal" results. Something was seriously wrong. What had exactly happened? He remembered clearly the strange smell and the feeling of the memory loop but nothing in him now showed any of this happened. Only his actions got recorded and they spoke for themselves.

He tried to stand up and look around. It did not look good. Although night vision worked fine, it did not clarify the situation, only confirmed what he already suspected. They were trapped by stones and rocks everywhere, the corridor was cut off from both sides. The place they were locked in was really small. He tried to scan the walls for a possible way out, but due to loss of the energon, he felt weak and had to sit down for a moment.

Then his optics slipped at her unconscious body again. He looked closer and realized the extent of injury caused by the avalanche. The multiple wounds and leaks were visible with plain eye. There was a big but not too deep cut on her chest and head, the armour was bent and twisted in many locations. It was quite serious but not terminal. Some welding would do the job.

Leaning a little closer, he touched the verges of the injured surface and assessed the damage. Surprisingly his own health repair systems returned functional readiness when it came to her wounds. Experimentally he welded a little keeping the torn verges of the armour together. It worked. He looked thoughtfully at the result of his experiment, and shrugged a bit in hesitation. They were trapped and there was no groundbride to make his way out, he rationalised. He will have to figure something out, and a spare pair of hands would be useful in case a more delicate job needed to be done. With no better answer than this and no other good reason he continued welding her major injuries and leaks.

It did not go too well, but she was still offline so he slowly fixed the leaks and cracks in her plating taking his time to analyse her structure. He looked closely at a large cut across her face, running over the cheek and mouth. He lifted his finger and stroke along it very gently, feeling the warmth of inflammation coming from her malfunctioning self repair. Delicately he applied his own repair kit along the cut sealing it up into a scar. Pausing for a while he looked at the effect.

 _::Beautiful...::_ The thought was striking.

It came along with the realisation of the feeling how energon kept on throbbing somewhere under his chassis, as if the pulse of her body got registered in him and kept replaying in a continuous loop. It was both pleasant and scary. It felt like a glitch but he did *not* want it to stop.

He moved even closer and suddenly he felt the urge to lift his mask up and rub his sensory wiring against this warm scar. He shook the thought off as soon as it appeared. He did not ever show his face to anyone. He was always covered with the black glass mask which hid his fragile construction of multiple sensors and which made him what he was in the eyes of the world. Soundwave, the slenderbot. One with no eyes, but who saw and heard everything. One who never spoke, but who was able to convey more than a thousand words with one picture or record. One that knew. One that could decipher intentions and thoughts of others but who never revealed his own. One from whom you could not hide. One that freaked the toughest Decepticons out by just standing there. Silently. Unexpectedly. Deadly.

He took some moderate pride in this image which was close to his technocrat truth. The face didn't really matter anyway, why would he bother. It was a tool, a pretty damn good tool with some good deadly destructive bits to it. It was rational to hide this masterpiece of ancient technology which was so easy to hurt, so risky to look at, the strangest and most powerful bit of his body.

Sometimes it itched a little to open up and get rid of the limitation, show the world what he was really capable of, but he also found comfort in hiding it, having something of his own. In fact hardly anyone realized what he was like behind the black mask which they treated it as his normal look. He did not show his face expression and he didn't even have to make an effort to hide it. What was his, belonged to him only, and he liked that the other mecha feared his faceless look. Noone, maybe apart from Shockwave, had any idea about him. Of course Laserbeak and Ravage had. But Ravage was gone and Laserbeak was his symbiont, almost a part of him, and symbionts were simply out of scope.

He calmed the thoughts a little and pulled back slightly limiting himself to enjoying the heat on his finger by stroking her freshly welded scar gently for a moment longer. Just to feel her energon running just below the tips of his claws...

At the same moment the so far offlined eyes opened suddenly looking straight at him.


	2. Chapter 2 - Truce

He pulled his hand back instantly. Her optics shone brightly for a moment and soon faded back a little as she tried to move up with a rusty screech. He stayed silent and motionless looking at her with his eyeless visor, black and impermeable. Behind it, all sensors worked at full speed.

He inspected her EM field that conveyed fear and anger. He heard how her systems suddenly kicked in like crazy. Despite that she did not react, only looked at him calmly. Self-control... A hint of respect flashed through his procesor. They eyed each other for a longer while before she finally spoke.

"Hi" - she said trying to smile with a painful grin. Her eyes scanned him attentively as she recognised him. - "Soundwave..."

She tried to move but the freshly welded wounds did not seal yet. He touched her arm pushing her back gently to the lying position.

"What is it you want? A new type of torture?" - She asked with a sarcastic tone - "Me in the hands of a Decepticon. How about that!" - the thought of raising her blasters and shooting him right in the head appeared and disappeared in the same moment when she followed his gaze sweeping over her wounds and the narrow cavern around them.

"We are trapped, aren't we?" - she asked looking at him intensely. He nodded.

"And you do not usually speak, do you?" - she added. He only looked at her. Then a scanning sequence visualised at his visor displaying her health status data and the recount of repairs. She shook her head a little in surprise. He obviously was trying to fix her with available means. She felt pain all around her frame but it was no illusion, she was really healing thanks to what seemed to be his efforts.

Slowly, he raised his hand again and moved forward to mending her remaining injuries.

"You are fixing me" - she stated the obvious. To no surprise he did not really react but just carried on with the work. She bit her lip plate a little while he welded last of her wounds to stabilize them for speed-healing but she was tough and focused not to make any unnecessary movement that could make things worse.

Finally he delicately let her go. Then he stood up and slowly left the little cavern to a bigger space near by. Carefully, he examined the walls and sought up the remains of the corridor which let him in previously. Not much of a corridor now. And in need of excavation. Rocks were blocking the way and everything had collapsed around them. The scanner reached not much further than some more layers of stone and inside the remains of the mine total darkness prevailed forcing him to night vision. The place they were stuck in was inconvenient but looked safe for the moment. Nothing else seemed to be tumbling down, the landslide must have ended and stabilised until anyone would push it out of the fragile balance again.

His groundbridge was still dysfunctional. Blasting their way out was out of the question though, if they didn't want to remain buried forever. Subtle manual labour was the only option at hand after the avalanche.

In order to do anything, he had to set his left aching arm into place. He gave it a try. It kicked him like a lightning with striking pain and an orchestra of system warnings. He bent down a little and grabbed himself around the wound with the other healthy wing.

She noticed the sudden movement. She lifted her head and her blue eyes turned attentively towards him. Little sparks of understanding surfaced in her optics.

"You are hurt too" - she said quietly with her scarred lips. - "Why don't you cure yourself?" - The blue flashes of her optical sensors became deeper and they focused on his black impenetrable face panel. He instantly collected himself and went on investigating the cave as if nothing had ever happened. But it was enough for her to tone down and soften. She started to remember - the explosion, the floor collapsing, the falling and the last memory of something grabbing her in the rocky avalanche. Now she realized what must have happened.

When the explosion happened she did not know that she was not alone since some time already and that he must probably have been spying after her in the abandoned mines. How otherwise would he be here now? Or have Decepticons found out what she was looking for?

Organicon, the substance she was after, was reported to be found on some organic planets, including Earth. It had an alleged capability to allow mecha to develop some organic features alien to mechanical beings. Arcee found a trace of its radiation some time ago in the abandoned mine-cave system that Autobots explored on another occasion in search for energon. She decided to secretly come back and look it up believing it would take just a few clicks and then she could be safely back to base. Noone knew about her little excursion, Optimus and Ratchet would never allow her on such a mission alone. Well, it seemed now this would not end up in a couple of clicks as she has previously foreseen.

So now she was here, trapped with Soundwave, in a most improbable situation. Strangely enough he was not hostile nor even really neutral. She had no idea how this came about but he was just done welding some of her wounds. And he was badly injured and too proud to request returning the favour.

She slowly raised herself up. She looked at the broken wing, it must have hurt horribly.

"Soundwave. Come over here" - she said after some moments of silence - "I can have a look at your wing. Ratchet taught me how to emergency weld wounds" - she added. He looked at her and after a moment of hesitation and then she turned back and sat down next to her showing the injury.

"You must lie down" - she said - "It cannot be bent like this" - He nodded and changed the position as she wanted it.

:: _Whoa_ :: she thought :: _Now I am fixing Soundwave. This cannot be_ ::. She sat closer and carefully examined his thin smooth wing from the top to the very end, where the slender claw-fingers extended bearing only slight resemblance to regular humanoid fingers of grounders like her. In this state, Primus help, this wing would not transform whatsoever. Some joints and connectors were twisted and torn way to badly for her to do anything about it. But she could at least stabilise it and reconnect the main wirings and pipings to allow the energon flow to feed the swollen tissues, as well as set the hydraulics back in place again so that he could regain at least some mobility.

The wing itself was sleek and long, very dark navy-blue-purple in colour with some hardly visible earlier scars which she noticed only upon closer examination. It was almost as long as his whole body, and she admired the beautiful forge. He had a very complex and aesthetic structure, with massive number of little details hidden underneath, not relevant for his robot mode but indispensable for a flight frame whose real world were flying in the open skies.

She never thought of it before but now she reflected how fine it would be to fly the way jets did. Feeling on the wing she played with this thought for a minute and grew a conviction derived from his perfect smooth built that he must have been forged, created from nature and not cold constructed by someone's hands. There was something extremely unique in the way he was built, starting from these arm-wings... She has never seen anything like this.

He did not get impatient with her inaction, on the contrary he seemed to be focused and at ease, giving her a strange feeling as if he was listening to her thoughts with some interest. It was a creepy feeling so she defroze from her thoughtfulness, collected her EM field closer to herself and got to work sticking the loose bits of the broken wing together. He helped her by displaying the schematics of the comlex built of the injured area. At first a little clumsy, but soon she caught the rhythm and the efforts yielded some pretty good results under the circumstances. She managed to reconnect the most important parts and stop the leaking. He did not move more than necessary and was patiently bearing her best attempts to operationalise his arm. It was far from the natural smoothness but it had to do. It was pragmatic.

All along the way she realized that what was happening it seemed sort of a deal in which they helped each other somehow for a purpose. She wondered how long this purpose would persist. _::This is called a truce::_ she thought to herself looking at the enemy symbol on his wing not far from where she was welding.


	3. Chapter 3 - Communication

Strangely enough, sitting there with his arm stretched over her knees, she felt completely safe as if she had him in her powers. This was certainly an illusion but she just did not feel the instinct to bother with this at the moment. Here and now it worked for her and there was harmony in all this setting, with the blue glow from her eyes, and greenish-violet bioglow from his armour seams, lighting only negligently the night vision aura.

When she finished, he got up to his peds and scanned the scar with appreciation, nodding a sort of thank you gesture towards her. Then he turned to the walls and resumed the thorough scan of their surroundings. She stood aside and did the same on her part. With some effort they found a radar projection of the likely corridor continuation and slowly set off to work. Stone by stone it needed to be cleared. It was hard to say what could be found on the other side but no communications or other tools worked here to allow a better scan so it had to do with the old-fashioned way.

Many hours passed while they were working. Then they recharged for a bit and then again many hours passed working again. They were tired and the silence was heavy and focused. Since long it was only disturbed by the sound of their work in clearing the way, slowly bit by bit, with hope to find a place from which they could use anything else but their bare servos without a risk that everything would cave in on their heads burying them forever in this unfriendly depth.

She said something from time to time, but he never expressed a word. She had heard before that he never speaks, but it was hard to believe, unless his voice box was damaged same as Bumblebee's. Because, why would someone choose not to speak? For example, Bumblebee who could not talk like others, found all possible workarounds through sound-coding or commlinks, being in fact one of the more talkative of them. This was obviously not the case with Soundwave. At some point she thought he was making fun of her in a certain way by just not replying anything while he could have done that so easily. It was irritating.

Somehow he did communicate however, but it was more through some self-explanatory gestures and technical schemes and calculations he displayed in front of him. She felt like he was somehow clear to understand when he wanted it, and that he understood her well beyond what she expressed, he did not even squeak a word himself. This was making her annoyed as the silence provoked too many thoughts crowding in her mind, with fear, anxiety and anger mixing in an untasty blend that made her feel like talking with someone, even if this was a Decepticon officer trapped with her as the only company.

On the contrary, there was something tempting in the idea of dragging him into some sort of non-technical communication. Something "with a human touch" as her organic friends would say. She tried a couple of times and he seemed to look at her (how could she see that, he had no eyes, no face whatsoever) and listen attentively. Sometimes he tilted his head a little to the side, clearly a sign of attention, as she explained to herself. When she finished talking he seemed to acknowledge and come back to work with no answer. A couple of times he showed her some things with a gesture catching her attention with a totally mechanical sound similar to that of their deck computer, a beep that meant nothing but just signalled that you need to look at something that flashed white or red and turned out to be another cross section diagram of the closest rock deposit that he managed to scan.

Once or twice she noticed also that, when he must have thought she wasn't looking, he covered the welded wound on his wing with his hand with a careful gesture. Once she thought she heard something like almost non-audible sigh that she more felt than registered with her audials. ::Painful::she was sure it must have been very painful, the wing must have hurt like hell while he worked, she could see how he tried to avoid lifting weights with it, helping himself with the very precise and efficient tentacles.

Somehow she understood him despite all this silence, and she realized that there was something awkward about this at the same time. Something almost psychic, as if communication was pouring from him right to her processor without using any commlink at all.

She was convinced she should have given up talking long ago, but yet another feeling kept her uneasy and pushed her to continue. This here was a Decepticon, known to be ruthless and brilliantly clever, cold as ice, about whom the rumour had it that he deleted his emotions once in order to speed up his processor and free his intellect from sentient limitations. This much for the gossip. However it just did not totally match with her gut feeling right now. Although his EM field did not show almost at all, she had a *feeling* there was a great inconsistency around him. As if something was going on inside him which she did not totally understand, unclear and strange. So she grew more and more curious of the very calm, methodic and well contained mech working next to her.

She did not know too much about Decepticons as persons altogether, beyond the rich experience she had in fighting them. She did not fully understand their motivations and thought only the worst of them, and the whole story here down in the cave looked quite unlikely to her. In the first place why was she still alive? Secondly, why did he patch her up and actively save her? Thirdly, what was that feeling she had when she was around him, as if there was something quietly desperate and very intense boiling everywhere around where he put his step. As if the ice-cube that he seemed to be was sort of melting and leaving wet footprints behind him, in which she followed, and every step made her even more uneasy and curious. She could not explain this. Did it have something to do with the entrapment, with the place they were locked in? The proximity of organicon that was supposed to be buried somewhere in this depth, if it at all existed and she was not wrong?

"Don't you ever say anything?" - she wondered aloud putting aside a stone she just removed from the blocked corridor like dozens of other stones that they removed since many hours. With these words she sent him a long stale gaze. He did not say anything, as usual. It pissed her off. Irritation crept along her hands and inside her chest with unpleasant tendrils of itching cold. An unclear bundle of feelings shot out of her finally:

"Do you even have a face at all, anyway?!" - she snapped angrily looking at his emotionless visor which turned to her finally in slow motion. Her words echoed in the still air as he froze in his movement and even deeper silence filled the cave. She could hear water dripping in a distance, drop by drop falling into some little pool hidden beyond the reach of her vision. It felt as if long minutes passed before he slowly put down the rock that he was holding and turned towards her, now fully.

He looked somehow bigger and stronger than she thought all this time. Dark armour colours with the inner glow on the seams made him seem a little demonic and she saw how the glow darkened and lightened slightly on him as if in a soft pulse. Despite his wounds and the slim posture he gave an impression of power and authority, like someone who perfectly knew what he wanted and didn't turn back in front of anything. Someone with no fear. Her gaze slipped down onto the Decepticon symbol on his injured wing and its sight sent a sudden shiver of dread down her backstrut.

Had she forgotten who he was?

She could not see it on the faceless mask but she felt his intense look somewhere from within, through the carbon dark glass that he had in place where most of living creatures had some sort of a face. But he did not have one. ::Or he does not show it::it struck her suddenly and she looked at him again, there, where he was supposed to have eyes. She could bet something almost invisible flashed red there behind the deep black, and it scared and upset her at the same time. Now he was standing there in front of her, silent as usual, glaring at her with strange intensity, likely offended with her straightforward and rude question. Instinctively, she felt like stepping back but she withstood the urge and remained in place. Yet, she could not help the slight trembling of her hands. She looked down on them. He must have seen it all the same. She could not hide it.

And suddenly she felt - rather than saw - a shadow of his wing putting down the rocks he was holding until now. She could not get her eyes of his visor though, as if something, a danger or a surprise could only come from there and the rest didn't really matter. A longer moment of silence fell over them again, and it felt eternal, unnerving and straining her patience. But for some reason she would not give up. And then again, as if it was an illusion, the visor was in the same place anymore but somehow closer to her face, not plain black anymore, but displaying a command in Old Cybertronian script:

 _Offline your optics._

First her eyes glared brighter with surprise. She tilted her head a little left, same like he would do when listening to her. The light from her eyes reflected in the carbon glass of his mask in front of her. Something paralysed her in place even more. She did not even move as saw his clawed hand moving slowly towards her optics until his thin fingers touched her eyelids very gently. She felt as if her locomotor system got glitched and just wouldn't move. Frozen as she stood not understanding why she was doing it, she obediently followed his request and slowly closed the eyelids offlining the optical sensors at the same time. His touch was hypnotising as if this was another Decepticon trick that he now used at her. If it was a trick, she agreed to be tricked and she followed...


	4. Chapter 4 - Spark

He wished she did not talk to him at all all that time. He wished that they just worked their way out of this maze and he could be back to normal. Just to set off and fly away. But there was nowhere he could fly to right now and he was getting dizzy more and more in this underground as if something very powerful gently took over his senses leading him to unexpected corners of his mind and his body. He vaguely remembered this state from the past, from before the war, before he managed to have all the disturbances locked out and erased for good. The explosion must have rebooted some very old backup fragments of his programming from the times he did not wish to remember, and now it took him over again. And strangely enough he liked it. This was the most scary part.

He leaned closer to her face and looked at her closed optics sensing her anxiety and curiosity, and yet something else - something blurring, soft and sweet. The heat inside him spread warmly and evenly giving a pleasant feeling of tension to his tissues hidden behind the armour. He could not resist it and nothing in him but the cold intellect wanted to stop it. But even the intellect was not so cold anymore, overwhelmed by the heat that was condensing since the moment he first caught her with his datacables down the exploded corridor, when the glitch kicked in.

The pulsing sensation only grew stronger and woke up a desire to break the silence which normally was so easy to keep in face of the nonsense of reality. But not now. He felt the heat and not only his own. It changed him in this moment, it made him want to say something, which he almost did by resorting to writing her the command line message.

Instead he slowly spread down his wing and reached out for her hand still looking intensely at her closed eyelids, ready to withdraw any second. He grabbed her hand gently and slowly raised it up in front of his face. She did not make any resistance, her eyes remained closed.

Did she trust him? Why would she? Her hand was warm and she let him hold it. He sensed it from the whirlwind of her field that encircled him almost tangibly spreading the intensity of her waiting. So he did trust her too, in that moment, impulsively, not sure of the possible consequences. Just because he wanted it badly exactly now. He wanted to show her that *she was wrong*.

She did not see how his visor lifted up silently baring his naked face. But she heard a slight hissing of the rarely used bearings and her spark pulsed a little stronger. He could feel the energon rush in her hand. He unwound her fingers delicately and gently pressed them onto his cheek. His real cheek. Part of his real face. The one that felt, that was soft and warm, the one that was hidden and erased from the memory of the past and deprioritized along with other distractions.

She did not back out. She did not open her eyes either, as if understanding the unspoken condition for this magic to persist. Instead, she focused completely on the feeling and after a moment she moved her fingers stroking him delicately.

The wave of heat lingering in him almost exploded. He felt he was burning under the touch. Each fingertip left a stamp, like a wound or a scar, but not one that would hurt but that would soothe and addict. A tremendous desire for more whirled in his head moving the world around. He felt the energon floating inside her just millimeters away from his most fragile sensors. The delicate stroking reached down to his spark encoding itself firmly as a signature of her acceptance. And his spark unwound from the tight little cage where he stuffed it in since years now to fill his whole body with a strong healing glow. He felt it boiling within him like a stormy ocean that wanted to break the dam and drown everything in itself - to embed her it its waters fully, instead of just slightly wetting the fingertips.

He let cross that barrier for the first time after so long, almost ever since he remembered. At the back of his mind he knew that this was the most dangerous thing he had done since vorns.

Instead, he did nothing but stood there silent and motionless letting her examine his face for as much as she wished, as if the whole of his existence was focused in this very spot. The bioglow lines on his armour changed intensity in slow motion, while the cooling subsystems hummed intensely trying to keep the body from overcharging. It developed into a subtle rhythm and finally, a little shy, he gently rubbed his cheek against her hand, responding to the touch. Encouraged, she travelled with her fingers further as if she was really blind and wanted to feel what he looked like.

His skin, the word that came to her mind to call it, was a bit rubbery, warm and soft to the touch. She felt a delicate pulsing texture of wiring and multitude of micro components beneath that all seemed to be throbbing with their own life. It was not hard, metallic or fixed like the one of other bots she knew including herself, but it felt like an incredible complex mechanism built of million bits covered by finest of insulations. It gave in to her touch when she tried to feel the little elements and everything responded to her fingers with an almost autonomous reaction of warmth and pulsation - like if they interacted directly with the particles of her fingers. But when she defocused a little everything seemed to be disappearing as if her fingers touched the air… A dance of hide and seek, she was not sure if she understood at all what she was touching.

So she focused deeply and an expression of fascination surfaced on her face, stunned and confused, strangely bright and happy. Yes, she *did forget* who he was, but he was nothing she could have imagined before. In the couple of orn spent together underground, the silent airborne mech gained an amazing complexity and attractiveness which she did not understand. It irritated but it also excited her to a suspicious extent. And now this. The face.

Well, she asked for it after all… This was what she wanted, to see his face, and he *did* that for her, for Primus sake, he did that, he broke the invisible barrier between them and now, in this very moment, she knew she gave up. Longing for whatever happens, just not to let it stop.

Blind-touching she found his forehead, then moving the hand down over his eyes she made him close them the same way he did to her before. It thrilled her to feel that he had most likely optical eyes, with humanoid-like eyelids, the old-fashioned way. Although she couldn't be sure if these are just not dozens of microparticles that he moved around structuring them into what she wanted to see. She longed to online her optics and see it for real, to see what he looked like, but with some deeper wisdom she contained it. Instead she moved her hand down towards his lips, letting her fingertips stay there for a moment discovering their existence. Eventually, her hand returned slowly to the burning cheek. All that time he just simply gave in to these caresses rubbing his skin delicately against her palm.

Conveyed through her fingers she almost physically felt the tension within him. She sensed also how important it was what just happened. She understood how suddenly naked and vulnerable he stood in front of her just trusting she would not trespass the unspoken barrier of vision. Her spark pulsed even stronger as she felt on this meshy skin that she imagined must have been carbon black just as his visor, and very complexly and beautifully textured.

And suddenly an impulse, a decision emerged inside her not leaving enough space for thought. She lifted her other hand on his opposite cheek and held his head in both hands. All the circulating currents forming the heat wave inside them burst up and connected them through her fingertips.

"What are you made of?" - she whispered breaking the silence but she did not say more, not expecting any answer. Instead she raised up her face dragging his head down slightly towards her, eyes still closed, she found his lips and kissed, the way humans did on this planet where they were trapped. The pleasure was so immense, that he almost staggered. Impulsively he lifted up both his wings and covered her smaller fingers with his own thin and clawy ones, squeezing her palms to his face a bit too strong, but none of them bothered. The currents on the connected surfaces went around like crazy leaving a burning feeling and smell of overcharge. He wanted to scream and roar with his rusty unused voice, but instead he released a hardly audible, slightest of pleasure moans.

She responded by moving closer and tighter so that now their chests and hips were leaning at each other. Electricity released across the two machine bodies overwhelming them both. She staggered on her legs that weakened suddenly while the deep sensation and a shiver of pleasure ran across her from head to toes. Then he could not resist anymore. His tentacles extended almost automatically and wrapped around her tightly, squeezing her to him. He imprisoned her in a bear hug of his long wings holding now her head in his hands and continuing the organic kiss gently outweighing the fire inside him. The world went around them both in circles, in a wonderful dizziness, enough for her to lose herself completely. He had her now so close, her strong body arched in his wings, she was both melting and yet tightening towards him, and he could register the flow of the fluids and currents inside her as well as the pulsing of her spark, just a few inches from his own just freshly befried one. It was so close to open up totally and merge the two throbbing sparks together, maybe in a few moments, deep underground in the foreign, alien world. Nothing else really mattered.

And then the world collapsed.

In a nanosecond of stupidity in the middle of this whirlwind she opened her eyes, just a little, half a millimeter, to see nothing more than two blurred burning red charcoals gleaming at her with desire just an inch away. But it was enough to momentarily blind her and take her out. A wave of inaudible sound blasted her off her feet, turning off all receptors and senses, powering her life functions down, offlining her deeply and completely. She did not see how instantly his mask fell down with a click covering his face behind its black armoured glass. For her, everything went dark and she did not fall to the ground just because he still held her pulsing faited body tight in his wings and tentacles.

She did not hear the genuine, unhindered roar of desperation striking around the cave walls causing rocks to collapse and fall of the sound in the confined space of the corridor they so carefully cleaned for so many hours - leaving them trapped inside worse than before.


	5. Chapter 5 - Hurt

Nooooooo!

Oh frag, frag, frag!

How could he have been so stupid? How could have he played it so horribly wrong? It was not supposed to happen...

He put her gently down releasing her from the hug and then he collapsed on his knees besides her, scraping the floor with anger and frustration. Energon spilled from his fingers as he crushed the rocks around him in sudden outrage. The bioglow from his spark flashed frantically around him. He reached out to her and absentmindedly stroke her face gently, staining her with his fingers now bleeding energon from the scratches and closing her half open eyes. Then he arched back leaning his head behind him on his shoulders and a painful shiver shook his still sparking frame.

It took a few clicks before his sensory network restored basic functions of normality. This all was just too strange, too overwhelming, he was not even sure why it started at all, how was it possible that he followed this impulse, this urge, to get close, to touch, to release the feeling, to let it win his mind... He did not even know her. She meant nothing in fact. She was just... someone he met and spent some time with trapped deep underground. Where did all this come from? The excitement, the pulse, the spark... and the opened mask, and the defense mechanism that kicked in uncontrollably. All this surpassed his capability to comprehend, smashing his logical and organised world apart in one little click. A moment of wonder transformed into grotesque and he was now feeling guilty, stupid and furious.

He looked at her lying unconscious on the floor. Then slowly, he scanned her for life signs and with a slight shade of relief he registered a faint, staggering spark pulse. He knew all too well what it meant. Everything will become clear in the next hours. If her system fights the sudden stasis lock, she will be back. If not, then... not. Nothing he could do about it.

Suddenly the broken wing started to ache horribly, his cheeks and lips still burned everywhere where she touched him, with engraved memory of her hand. And now she was lying there beside him defunct, just because of his damned silence, his stupidity, not to have explained her anything, not to have secured her against himself. Even for the sake of the heat of that moment just before... So different to a couple of days ago, now the *last* thing that he wanted was her to be offline.

He did not realize that small drops of energon spilled from under his visor while he angrily has thrown himself inwards into his own system looking for the bloody sensory bug that caused all this. Everything hurt him now. His system hurt just because it was there. Kill it, kill it. Kill the feelings, why couldn't he be himself, the one he knew for the many recent vorns. Why couldn't he just run away, transform and fly off to the world that he knew. Do the things he did best: hack transmissions, fix computers, spy on others and keep order on Nemesis.

He deeply felt like formatting his own system for a moment, or at least find the faulty sector and delete it. Delete the bloody forsaken ancient backup from the oldest times on Cybertron, when he was protoformed into what he now covered under the mask. He was made for a world different than the one that transformed him, that made him poisonous. He was not always like this...

But it was so easy to be a Decepticon this way, the cold-sparked technocrat he had become after his drastic emotional surgery. All the time afterwards he was sort of happy with himself this way. Or satisfied. The soul did not hurt, nothing really mattered too much, nothing bothered. Everything was logic and analysis. It was easy to follow Megatron's cause by evaluating the pros and cons of actions based on the practical implications. He could focus and did not need really too much or almost nothing for himself. Not like in the past, when he was still sentient, too sentient, when he lived overwhelmed with all that he did not want to know or hear, but he did, as he was forged to hear, know and record.

And since he erased the emotions, he almost forgot how to bear feelings that bother, touch or excite. Only very few remains omitted by the script needed for his basic functioning and survival worked for him in the form of reflexes and intuition. And the attachment to his closest symbionts - but they were really a part of him, so in fact it could qualify as a basic instinct to protect one's own limbs or organs. Now, after the glitch hit him, he was a bit like a child. Overwhelmed and enchanted. And broken. Any protection was gone. It all was too much for him, the scripts that he once developed long time in the past to control his emotions, when he still had them, have long since expired and fitted nothing anymore. At least he thought so looking at her lying unconscious in front of him, as he slowly calmed down to restore his logical functions and system parameters.

This would explain why he could not cure himself thoroughly but he could heal her after the explosion. His disturbed system scan did not reach important bits of himself, it must have been related to that, he thought. Not everything now could be logically analysed in him and the confusion created false iterations, loops and bugs...

Cooling down slowly he realized that despite the dramatic change he was still able to discern the logical and intellectual functions from the emotional reactions that drowned his body in a cocktail of chemistry which worked on him like alcohol on an abstinent human being. But still, he reflected, biologically speaking, if he followed his chemistry fully like it wanted him to, he would have exploded himself or would have squeezed her unconscious trying to intake her through every opening of his frame and mix her spark with his own. The wiring beneath the armour itched even now, and at the sole thought of it his face started burning again. But he did not do what pure biology wanted. He was soft and gentle. He just enjoyed the tension building up in him, he took pleasure in the sensuality and uncertainty of the contact. He enjoyed the fact that just a touch of her hand on his cheek could make him react with every sense, as if there was some strange power in it incomparable to any resources in the known universe.

He looked at his own hands, and down at his body. He felt really, really strange. All that he just experienced was something utterly awkward. He realized he followed a very deep desire which did not exist at all in his non-sentient part of the past. But at the same time, he did not lose it completely. He felt as if he took the best of it. So this was how it felt. What he has seen in others so many times, their ups and downs, their fire and ice storms, foreign to him, now hit him with such a strength... And he still felt that in fact it did not let go. It only changed again, it flowed across him, as the complex emotional matrix was storming through him while he tried to balance it with his intellect and thinking. Even now...

If she were conscious... he could just lie there and let her touch him the way she did just a moment ago for almost forever draining his energy and sharing this incredible glow that he had developed for a moment. He wanted to have her lively and pulsing, back in his arms again. Although he knew he would eventually ask for more. Or would he be just granted this out of her own desire?

He shook his head desperately trying to revert to intellect, feeling the heat wave and tension approaching again, warmly tickling and pressing the wirings, itching the inside of his body and pulsing in his hydraulics, cables and sensory networks. He looked at her with resignation. She wouldn't wake up too soon anyway. He could allow himself a bit of that warmth before everything will have to be restored back to normal. One last time, just a little. As long as the surreal situation persisted.

Slowly he raised up the mask again and the blood-red glow of his eyes filled the cave. He moved closer to her and nestled himself down on the ground next to her powered down frame. Carefully he put his face next to hers so that he touched her cheek with his own. An energon drop dripped on her from a painful scratch her fingers left on his face when she went offline. He noticed it, rubbed it gently off her cheek, and suddenly became very sad.

What if he really gets himself restored to his pristine unemotional state? Wouldn't this mean exactly the same as if she did not ever wake up? Would this mean that he would lose this ability to feel such wonderful things he just experienced but still remember the pleasure and closeness that now could not be regained? He stroke her delicately on the cheek and providently closed his own eyes. The only thing he wanted while waiting for her to survive was to feel the touch of her on his bare face. He would have to get going and uncave them, but these few moments were still his. Before all is gone. He squeezed his healthy wing under her arms, covering her chest with the other, wounded one and pressing his face even stronger to hers in a tight hug. Although his skin insulation was too vulnerable to be exposed to anything outside for too long, he remained like this as long as he could, until the tiredness and endured emotions turned his limbs numb and peripherals off one by one. Finally the emergency protocol slowly moved his mask down into place before he fell into full power down and recharge.


	6. Chapter 6 - Float

Arcee was floating weightlessly in the black-blue-red light. She was feeling safe and calm. Her body was relieved and light, as if all tension was gone and the only sensation she felt was this soft pleasant weakness in her limbs and head. Her fingertips were melting with the darkness around her. She could move her hands freely and it seemed as if energon was moving back and forth inside her and there was no real physical boundary between her and the reality. She felt no pain and it was warm and hypnotising. She slowly opened her eyes wider and the darkness gained purple-bluish patterns and the light concentrated slowly as she was trying to focus her vision.

The floating and weightlessness persisted as if she were in a vacuum, while the shadows she saw were gaining structures bit by bit, first blurry then more and more becoming into shapes... A black armoured glass mask and the strong built chest were leaning over her, as well as the long long wings and thin waist with visible bioglow lines. Two red dots of his eyes shone through the black glass of his visor while he was looking at her.

She smiled to him and slowly reached out to touch his visor but it seemed that her hand went right through. She felt a little soft weight pressing against her chest, arm and cheek. Warmth spread from there but she could not see anything. There was nothing, only the vision of him floating in the vacuum above her. So she looked at him feeling the warmth spreading across her body from the pleasant heaviness resting on her. The vision floated with her and she felt more and more cozy. Once more she failed to reach him and suddenly she started to fall with some rocks that appeared from nowhere. They were passing by her and through her but she did not feel the hits, as if she was immaterial.

Then some hands grabbed her, and the world went round, she felt very heavy and still falling while the vision of Soundwave started to water down into the distance. There was suddenly pain and a numbing feeling of cold that bit her metal body. Her head started to explode with pain and she now felt all the falling rocks hit her in a nasty, cold way like frost bites. Everything was freezing and wet and she could not move anymore. And she heard voices approaching closer and closer.

"Arcee, Arcee, wake up Arcee" - she felt large amounts of snow falling on her like an avalanche, covering and uncovering her on its way down, taking all the heat away and numbing her to any external signals.

"Arcee, do you hear me?" - in the blur of her headache she recognised the voice of Optimus approaching her from the frost-biting darkness spreading around her. Then the snow was gone and she felt being lifted slowly and put on something. - "We will take you home" - she heard the bossbot's soothing voice. - "Thank Primus we received your rescue call" - he added partly to her, partly to himself. - "Where have you been all these days?" - he muttered to himself.

She opened one eye just to see his worried face above her. He smiled from ear to ear seeing her onlining. - "That's my girl! Autobots, Arcee is waking up!" - he called at the others. - "You are lying in Ratchet's trailer, he will take you home. You have suffered from supercooling. You were lying here in the snow for quite some time, but now it is all right". - He smiled to her again with the warmest of smiles a serious bot like him could have at stock.

She smiled back weakly and tried to raise her head and look around but it did not work too well. "Oh, Optimus! Where am I? What happened to Soundwave?" she asked in a very silent voice.

"Lie down Arcee, you are not in the best condition. Soundwave? What about Soundwave?" - Optimus expression changed to surprise. - "He seems not to be here. No sign of any Decepticon when we arrived. You fought Soundwave? When we are back at base you will tell us what happened. You are quite injured and exhausted now. Rest a little. There will be plenty of time to talk" - he said putting his hand on her arm. - "You are safe now".

 _::To talk::_ she considered the concept and it echoed in her processor that talking is not really a right thing to do. It was not her own thought, she would bet, but she was too weak to analyse.

He closed the door. She heard him transforming and everybody rolled out. The soft swinging of Ratchet's emergency car made her sleepy and she fell into recharge again before they even reached the groundbridge location only to wake up much later already at the medbay. She dreamt another dream with Soundwave lying hurt on the ground bleeding energon all over his body. She tried to restitute him and stop the bleeding but again her hand passed through him like through the air and she could do nothing.

* * *

Something crashed heavily against the landing deck of Nemesis. KnockOut felt the ship shake a little as his medbay was located close the landing field entrance hatch. Luckily the emergency alert systems did not turn on. So it must have been one of the Vehicon troopers crash-landing after some failed endeavour, he thought, and turned back to his work.

Without paying too much attention the Decepticon medic sunk in his usual stuff, experimenting with phaseshifter, a new relic recovered by the Cons that allowed passing through solid objects, trying to figure out how the tool worked and potentially be able to copy it in the future. Focused he did not hear the door open and the silent steps approaching. Only a nasty screech of metal behind him finally drog his attention to the visitor.

"Ah, Soundwave, the big man was looking for you..." - he started automatically but then he realised what he was in fact seeing in front of him.

"Oh scrap! Soundwave! What the hell happened to you?" - his jaw dropped down to the floor, but he defroze as quickly as he got shocked. He rushed to Soundwave and supported him from falling down.

KnockOut has never seen Soundwave in such a condition. He looked as if fresh from a battle. He hardly stood on his legs, his armour was damaged and his wing was in the strangest shape, stuck half-way in transformation in the form of a bulky glitch of metal scrapheap trembling freakishly as if it still tried to regain the proper form over and over again spilling energon all over the place.

KnockOut helped him across the room and he had to almost lift the silent visitor in his arms onto the medberth where he placed the suddenly very heavy mech for examination. It was clear to him that the guilty factor was a faulty transformation that stuck halfway on some tissues that were obviously injured before causing the overall blocking of the whole process somewhere in the middle, stuck from progressing one way or the other which resulted in an overall pitiful and painful effect.

With a visible effort Soundwave turned his visor to him and a disrupted list of failures and injuries displayed across from his internal healing systems, which now seemed to be failing dramatically.

"Ok, ok" - KnockOut stopped him with a hand gesture - "I get it, you're injured, but first we need to disentangle this bundle over here" - he showed the closer undefined shape of the half transformed wing. - "Man, it looks like you were chewed up by a dinobot" - he said while examining the pitiful thing that once was Soundwave's wing. Loads of bits were displaced and a large wound was open with signs of unskilled welding attempts up on it.

While working KnockOut babbled his usual chatter commenting everything he saw and recounting the current situation on the ship and Megatron's irritation over the missing of Soundwave over the last few days. Things obviously waited to be fixed, stuff to be done, the usual crap that he typically just took on and went ahead with.

Now lying in the medbay, half subdued with KnockOuts anesthetics, he heard all this from a distance and could not even afford a slight irritation. Instead, despite the immense risk of KnockOut being here and working on his body, he couldn't stop frantically replaying for himself the scenes and thoughts from the last days, struggling with a decision what to do next.

Then, after a good number of blurry hours, a comment reached him from the distance:

"Almost done. Your self-repair is back on and the wing is fixed. You should stay and recharge here a bit under my observation before this heals at least basically. How on Cybertron did you get yourself smashed so badly? It takes a monster just to scratch you usually".

Soundwave did not manage more than just to look at him floating in his anesthetic bubble, while KnockOut continued chuckling and teasing him:

"Man, it must have been a romantic weekend out, not to give any sign of life this way. Good you haven't eloped altogether, Megatron would be pissed as hell. You have such a hell of a cocktail of chemistry floating around in you. I do not want to know what happened to you but it doesn't look like the good old Soundwave I know."

Normally Soundwave would shrug at this kind of comment, but now he only lay silently not reacting at all. But it woke him up somewhat.

Surprisingly enough KnockOut's face became serious. With some unusual certainty he put his hand on the silent seeker's arm. - "I never suspected you could become one of us." - he said totally out of sudden and looked at his diagnostics thoughtfully - "I do not know what happened but I will keep what I saw for myself, no need for anyone to know unless you want to say something yourself. But be aware, this is as wonderful as dangerous. I wish I could live it myself again with this intensity I can see in you..."

KnockOut did not make it clear what he had in mind but it ringed a whole orchestra of warnings. Soundwave raised his head up and looked KnockOut deep in the eye. Despite the faceless expression on his visor, something must have hanged in the air as KnockOut nodded silently looking a bit shy after being so direct to the normally alien-cold communications chief. He wished Soundwave answered something but the slenderbot remained silent as usual. His gaze slipped along his wing to the place now almost perfectly fixed by KnockOut revealing just a minor scar. Soundwave touched it slowly and remembered the scar on Arcee's face when she was still in stasis after the explosion. He lead his finger slowly along it and a shiver crossed his body. KnockOut saw it and understood more than words would say. - "I cannot heal you better than that. Some stuff cannot be really healed, that is a part of being one of us. But now it will transform all right".

A moment of silence followed, then a blank reading on Soundwave's face changed into something KnockOut never saw before. It said:

 _Thank you_

And despite the unspoken opposition from the medic, the slenderbot stood up slowly from the berth, and with a heaviness that KnockOut had never seen in him, he left the med bay.

"Hwee, hwoo" - KnockOut whistled to himself thoughtfully a few moments after the door closed. "So the slenderbot has crashed himself against real life" he murmured with both compassion and satisfaction. "Good there are still doctors like me around to patch up the broken sparks. I would give a million to see him there, and another one to know who the unlucky victim was. And what happens next..." - with this thought, a slight scary shiver crossed his backstrut.


	7. Chapter 7 - Script

Optimus was worried. Arcee was recovering well over the past two days, but she would not speak almost at all. She was mostly recharging connected to a complex machinery in Ratchet's medbay, while he was fixing her wounds and murmuring some curses over the her broken self repair system that did some weird welding jobs on her.

Optimus noticed also that she seemed very distant and sad when she was awake and thought nobody was looking. He knew that her laugher at Bumblebee's and Bulkhead's jokes was different than usual and not from deep inside. When she hugged Jack, Raff and Miko overjoyed by her comeback, she smiled genuinely but soon she drifted away in some awkward numbness all the same. He was wondering seriously what had happened in the span of around one week when she was gone, and listening to Ratchet's grumble about some weird chemistry detected in her during first tests as well as some light but inexplicable burns on and within her body did not make him more optimistic.

The following day when everybody else was on patrol and Ratchet was busy with his scientific research he sat next to her in the medbay and finally dared to ask about the events of the past days.

"We were worried about you, you were gone for over an Earth week." - he said with an honest voice. "What happened? I understood you were looking for something in those old mines, and it went very wrong."

Arcee looked at Optimus, aware that this moment would had to come sooner or later. She never lied to him. She respected him probably most of all bots she had ever known. Not for his seniority and rank, but for the person that he was. Wise, strong, caring and selfless.

"I was after organicon" - she said finally in a low voice. "I did not expect it would turn out like this".

A moment of silence filled the medbay. "I did not find it but now I am nearly sure it exists. I am sorry I did not tell you on beforehand. I should have, but I did not think you would ever allow this kind of a quest. I am sorry Optimus, I did not mean it..."

He nodded.

"I know it is a female thing. Only femmes can find and master organicon" - he looked at her with a mix of understanding and anxiety "And there is not so many femmes left around, is there" - he sighed - "But something happened. Something strange and not safe. You mentioned Soundwave. Was he following you?"

She did not know what to say. "Quite likely but not sure. I did not know he was there until the old mine caved in after those very old explosives went off. Someone must have guarded it really well back in a day. Very old type of security that I did not expect and I did not detect. I lost my communications and was pretty badly injured and trapped down there."

Optimus nodded thoughtfully. "Are you sure it was not a Decepticon trap? Anyway, good you managed to send the rescue signal when you got out of the caves in the end."

"I did not" - she replied to his astonishment. - "I couldn't. Only now Ratchet fixed my comms... I was offline with all emergency and alerting systems down".

He looked at her without understanding. - "What do you mean? We received your signal..."

She looked at the wall and only after some silence she said - "He saved me at least twice. We did not fight each other. We worked together to get out. We spent all this time down there trying to dig us out, with our bare hands".

Optimus looked closer at her not fully understanding what she was trying to say.

"It looks like he saved my life" - she repeated - "He caught me from falling deep down with the stones when it exploded and then he fixed me up because my self repair went down. I was leaking badly" - she paused for a moment still without looking in his eyes. - "He could have killed me but he saved me."

The story matched with results of Ratchet's obduction when they brought her to the base. There were some fixes on her that looked different than what any Autobot self-repair was programmed to do.

"And you are sure that was THE Soundwave? Megatron's communications chief? So he must have had a really good reason. He does not do anything without a reason".

"I fixed him too... he broke his wing badly. It was like none of us could be really selfish there. Something stronger took over... This is what they say organicon does to bots" - she explained and a thought struck her that at the same time - it might have not been true, no organicon was there outside the mountain and still he must have called for the Autobots to fetch her using her frequency. How else would they got the rescue signal, she was completely out... And she was not sure how organicon could affect her this way but she remembered the fire she felt with him down in the cave. She shivered.

"He was nothing of what I would have ever thought of him before" she said looking at Optimus, who shook his head in disbelief.

"So you say it is not just a legend. Organicon must be a powerful weapon then" he considered. "If it changed someone like Soundwave even for a minute it must be able to do much more of which we do not even realize. But how did you get so badly offlined in the end? Ratchet suspected some very peculiar infrasound exposure that triggered some strange reactions in you".

She looked up to the ceiling wondering how to put it and not to mess it up.

"That was later. I...ehm... being locked up together a bit long, when it turned out what the situation was, we started sort of communicating... Technically he is not much of a talker, but well, there are workarounds. And down there in the organicon radiation we changed... somehow. All this saving and helping..." - she sighed - "This is what I heard it can do" - _::but::_ , she thought to herself, _::it wasn't supposed to do everything that happened after_... _::_ And she realized that it was more than a thought, it was a _hope_...

She decided to make it short. - "For some reason I was very stubborn insisting to see his face. I teased him it did not exist. Well, that is what everybot thinks anyway. Finally he agreed that I could not see it but at least touch it to prove it was real, but I was supposed not to open my eyes. I didn't fully get why, until, ehm, I cheated and peeped when I thought he wasn't looking. It smashed me out of my circuits" - she spoke even quieter than before.

"You mean you looked despite that he asked you not to? What exactly smashed you?" - Optimus now seemed really curious.

After a dragged moment of silence she replied:

"I think I saw his eyes".

* * *

As Soundwave went into his minimalistic quarters the door closed behind him with a slam and he opened a little power shield that allowed him some privacy, a rare asset on Nemesis, especially, ironically, with such Cons as himself around. But he was the comms chief and he knew all the others' secrets so he could afford some of his own.

He sat down on his berth and inhaled the air into his ventilation system with a hiss. Now he could not drag it for much longer. Anyway it was a mistake to show up at the medbay in the state that he was. KnockOut obviously knew too much now, and it must have been more evident than he would have even thought. So, if he doesn't erase the newly acquired self, it was logical that something unexpected would happen with more than a high probability. This was because, fledged with his new feelings, he lost control and predictability of his own actions. He could no more trust himself, and sooner or later it meant a disaster. He knew well KnockOut was right and gave him a fair warning, in his own way. And Soundwave felt uncomfortable with it.

He remembered himself cuddling to her when she went offline, he remembered how he literally melted under the touch of her hand on his face wiring. He thought of how fascinating the experience of desire was, together with the gentleness that he developed for her in a matter of just a few orn since the emotions must have unblocked. It was like if he had his hands tied in a way he could set them free anytime but did not just do it out of some perverse pleasure.

Even now as he was sitting alone in his cold and impersonal cabin of Nemesis, he could recall all the feelings, and he could sense his own energon going madly around him at these memories. It fascinated him how everything in him changed on its own depending on what his thoughts would bring him. It was in his processor, in his RAM, it cashed everywhere around his hard drives, it occupied his registries and it was surging in his peripherals, and it was at the same time physically generating his body chemistry, affecting his hydraulics and even micro-osmosis. He just couldn't contain it.

At the same time he felt like crying, jumping, laughing and dying in turns for no reason. But most of all, he wanted to go a couple of orn back, to the same situation with her down in the caves, to finish what has begun, to get some warmth and relief. He wanted to connect with her again, tell her how to be safe with him. Oh, he would let her touch him as much as she wanted, just for the sake of the burning sensation on his spark that now wanted to be released out even at the cost of losing its amazing powers. Throughout all this torment he remained sitting motionless and silent with his optics staring blindly at Laserbeak seated next to him on the berth.

This all did not go in line with anything. It was so powerful and he understood dangerous it was. Anyway he knew these fantasies wouldn't ever happen. They were enemies with no option of consolation, on the opposite side of the war front. And by now she should have already been found by the fellow Autobots where he left her and called for help using her frequency. Maybe she was waking up from stasis, maybe not even remembering anything. He looked at his hands and stroke softly the head of Laserbeak surprised at this unexpected generous treatment.

With sadness in magnitude he did not realize he was capable of, he slowly sought up in his archival drives and compiled the old ancient script that had made him once what he was. He prepped the modification launcher to induce the reset and deletion sequence. It was the oldest and scariest mental surgery protocol that even Megatron would not dare to run, and of known bots, Shockwave only experimented with. And Soundwave. At the time. Long ago. And he had never really regretted that before. But now he hesitated and could not force himself to execute the command.

One last time Soundwave replayed what he remembered from the abandoned mine. Clinging to the memory he rewound some moments again and again, each time painfully feeling the loss he was just about to inflict on himself. He looked at the little mechanical head of Laserbeak and his small chest with a tiny spark in it, and he made a decision.

Carefully he reconnected with the little symbiont and made an extended sensory memory dump into his hidden secret backup site, uploading an exact copy of his own current modified CNA together with a full sensory configuration image, well coded. He leaned above the bird and whispered to him with his flat rusty voice that nobody else was allowed to hear: " _Don't you ever lose this, my spark_ ". He stroke Laserbeak's head again and hugged him for a moment like he was his secret treasure box, and let him disconnect from his chest making sure the avian cannot connect back until it was done.

And the he lay down on his berth, touched the scar on the wing, offlined his eyes and ran the script.


	8. Chapter 8 - Birds

"His optics… Is that why he hides them?" - Ratchet asked entering the room. He must have heard at least a part of their conversation, as he looked like understanding what they were talking about.

"Quite likely" - Arcee said, turning her head - "They trigger some sort of effect that blasts you when you look at it only. But not when you keep your eyes closed. Anyway it did not affect me before I opened my optics".

"Strange… I don't know" - Ratchet wondered looking at Optimus. Then he turned to her - "I will see what we can figure out. Rest now, and don't worry sweetspark" - he said much softer than anyone could ever expect of Ratchet.

"Ratchet is right" - Optimus said - "You need to rest and recover now. We will worry about Soundwave's secrets later".

They left the room, and Arcee closed her eyes. The nervous slummer caught her again, and she dreamt of Soundwave flying in his aircraft mode surging joyfully across the clouds, bathing in the sun, swirling in the sky - like a living bird creature from the Earth, with no pragmatic purpose at all.

* * *

KnockOut, a little curious, a little worried, knocked to Soundwaves quarters for the third time with no reply before he decided to enter. When he finally did, he saw Soundwave on his bed, looking like in a deep stasis. The medic's eye caught a glimpse of a few little drops of energon leaking from under his mask.

"Hmm" - he wondered. - "What happened over there" - he has never examined Soundwave under the visor and once when the mask was cracked Soundwave allowed only some external intervention and then disappeared from the medbay together with the spare mask and some utensils and materials prepared by KnockOut for the surgery and did not show up throughout the following two days until he fixed himself and recovered hidden from everybody. It was irritating as KnockOut knew the deepest wirings of Megatron while he knew close to nothing of this creepy slenderbot here. Actually, he realized, it was the first time he saw him fully unconscious.

KnockOut touched the leaked energon with his finger and smelled it. Structural analysis of its particles seemed normal but something did not fully match with, let's say, KnockOuts gut feeling. He ran a quick scan over the motionless Soundwave and to his anxiety he found out totally nothing. The reading was empty, blank, clear. He reset the sensor tool but it did not help. He measured his own reading for comparison, and everything was normal. Then it arrived at him that the leaking energon was too fresh, too perfect, like the one still circulating in a living system and not one dried out and oxygenated outside from the body for some time.

He looked at him in disbelief and with some reluctance he touched Soundwaves neck wiring with his hand seeking out the main pipe connector running between the head and the spark chamber. It was a little warm and pulsing with a peaceful flow of energon through Soundwaves vascular system.

"What the heck?" - the doc murmured to himself.

"Yes, KnockOut, what the heck?" - an ironic low voice reached him just from behind his shoulder.

"Lord Megatron" - KnockOut turned around stunned for a nanosecond but instantly put himself together and acted as if nothing ever surprised him. - "Soundwave got sick, I'm checking on him and my scanner seems to have a bug. Gotta give it a check."

"What do you mean he got sick?" - Megatron raised his optic ridge and flashed suspiciously with the red of his eye.

"He was on some mission and got into some kind of fight and got beaten up and exposed to unknown radiation. I patched him up a little." - He tried to stay as close to the truth as it got. - "He is not precisely the one who would recount in details what happened" - he added excusing himself a little.

"Indeed" - Megatron nodded and then KnockOut realized a shadow was standing behind him.

"Soundwave, are you better?" - Megatron addressed the shadow while KnockOut turned around to see the big chest and the black visor of the communications officer just behind him. Soundwave nodded.

"Good" - Megatron seemed content - "Come, I need to show you something. The storage systems are glitching again on the dark energon stocks deck".

"Soundwave, are you sure you do not want still to rest a little?" - KnockOut sounded uncertain mapping at the same time the disappearance of the energon drop from the con's armour where he investigated it a moment ago. Soundwave looked slowly at KnockOut with his faceless face and though the Doc saw nothing, he could bet his spark that the slenderbot blinked at him from somewhere deep behind his mask.

"Okay, don't forget the checkup tonight" - he said in Soundwave's general direction with the most light and blase tone he could afford at the moment out of his rich repertoire.

The two mecha went away leaving him at the doorstep of Soundwaves quarter. KnockOut did not move for a moment or two and then in a silence he heard something from inside of Soundwaves room. He felt at the door and it was not locked. KnockOut made sure that those two were gone and carefully entered the communications chief's quarters again. As he went in he saw Laserbeak in the middle of the room throwing vigorously some little colourful stones against a bigger one and cawing joyfully at them for no apparent reason. The stones fell apart in disorder, but this did not discourage Soundwave's symbiont from the activity.

KnockOut looked at this for a moment motionlessly understanding better and better with every moment that Laserbeak was… *playing*. Having *fun*. Jumping a little and flying up with the stones, admiring them bouncing down at the floor, tilting his head to left and right looking at the rocklets that he was trying to place together. He behaved the way young Earth ravens would do when they thought no-one was watching and they had their time off from hunting. KnockOut observed that once on a patrol and wondered long what kind of sense it made for the little creatures. But those there were irrational organics and this here was Soundwave's Laserbeak.

For some reason at this point KnockOut decided not to be so curious anymore. Whatever the slenderbot did or where he went for the last week was safer to leave to his business. He saw enough already back in the medbay witnessing Soundwave's spark in such an unrest as if it was shock-raised from the dead almost killing its owner in turn with overcharge. He never saw such a lively, bright and pusing spark, and he would never expect it in the coldest of bots.

Silently he stepped out from the room. Laserbeak must have noticed it and he squeezed through the gap in the closing door in the last second, made a circle or two around the astonished medic blinking at him with a shiny bird-eye, and off he went right out of the open hatch between a group of Vehicons coming back from a patrol.

KnockOut ran a few steps after him and looked out through the still open door to the landing deck. The last he saw of Laserbeak was how the mechanical bird flew out right into the sky with a series of light dance-like movements, diving down and surging up, spiralling in a joyful acrobacy before he became really really small, a little dark spot on the sky among Earth birds on the horizon.

* * *

Arcee woke up from a restless dream in the middle of the day after another very long recharge. She was alone as everybody went on patrol. The sadness kept to her and she did not feel like getting up or doing anything. But she went to the window, to see the sunny day, and leaned her head in her hands on the windowsill, nestling her hard metal scarred cheeks in her palms, and she looked at the little dots of some distant birds playing high in the sky. They were going up and down, swirling in the wind without an apparent reason, feeling the air caressing their wings, across the sunshine, clouds and the sky.

For that moment, she wished most of all that she were a seeker.


	9. Chapter 9 - Notes and Glossary

**This short story is part of a larger story which cannot be posted here due to rating limitations. For anyone interested to find out what happened next: it can be found on Archive of Our Own (AO3) under my profile RealityGlitch, entitled ..::Depth of Field::..**

* * *

The story is mostly based on TransFormers Prime (TFP) Universum. Mostly. Some terms and ideas are taken from Generation 1 (G1) and the Animated Series 2007. Some I just made up.

When quoting algorithms or database content, please do not expect any fully fledged/correct script, I had to simplify for the sake of understandability for normal readers who are not nerds :D

* * *

 _Time measurements:_

Click/Nanoclick = a short moment

Orn = ~1 day/planetary cycle (the period of time during which a planet /in our case Earth/ completes one full rotation)

Vorn = ~83 years (or just around a century, who cares how much it is precisely)

Eon = division of time encompassing a full geological cycle of a planet = very very long, the whole history of Earth is a few eons in fact

* * *

 _Other terms (alphabetically):_

Allspark = An artefact of Primus, a source of sparks, capable of creating new life by introducing a spark into eg. a cold constructed body.

Backstrut = spine

CNA = DNA equivalent, genetic code of Cybertronians

Cold construction = artificial way of creation of bots that are built and later implanted artificially with a bit of spark (can be someone else's). Cold constructed bots could be less sentient and more "robotic" in comparison to the forged ones. Many Decepticons were constructed cold. At least in some versions of the universe.

Comms = communications

Cons = short for Decepticons

Dark Energon (also: Unicron's Blood) = inverted destructive version of Energon, a powerful drug giving great strength and abilities to its bearer but also corrupting the judgement by turning its user to serve Unicron's greater (evil) aims.

EM field (also: field) = electromagnetic field around a bot, everybody has that, even humans. Similarly to the facial expression or body language, it may give indication of feelings and mood of a person. It can be controlled to some extent through training and self-discipline.

Energon (also: blood) = the life giving/nurturing substance - in nature it takes a form of dried crystals, but inside the body resembles some sort of blood and functions similarly to blood. Too much loss of it means the spark may get extinguished = death

Femme = a female bot (just a conventional designation referring to sort of a gender only as they do not have humanly understood physical sexes and eventually it doesn't matter too much on everyday basis)

Forged = (way of birth of a Cybertronian) - naturally created of an energy pulse (from the Allspark or Vector Sigma depending on the universe version) that ignited (randomly as I presume) a hot spot in Cybertron where new sparks would emerge from the planet's matter - it implies creation of sentient beings with feelings and souls, analogue to those that Earth people have. Most Autobots were forged (some of them allegedly born of a relationship or spark duplication but this is too mysterious to get into exactly what it means ^^)

Frag, slag (and forms thereof) = swear words :) Translate to what you like and feel inappropriate enough

Groundbridge = the main teleporting method for short distances used by Transformers (vs. space bridge for interstellar travel) - normally executed with complex devices, but Soundwave mastered it as his skill and he is the only one that can do it with his bare hands ;) without additional external equipment. Like a couple of other things that he can also do and nobody knows exactly how.

Grounder = a bot with ground-based alternative mode

Mech = a male bot (just a conventional designation referring to sort of a gender only as they do not have humanly understood physical sexes and eventually it doesn't matter too much on everyday basis)

Nemesis = Decepticon warship orbiting Earth, where everybody sits and gets bored planning new evil plans. *Nothing* to do with Nemesis Prime. Contrary to the original in TFP, Nemesis in my story is female. It just felt better this way.

Offline = unconscious (can be also through sleeping). It does *not* mean dead. For dead I use "dead" :) That is not exactly in line with some cartoons, but it was confusing in my opinion otherwise.

Organicon = the mysterious substance they were looking for, I totally made it up.

Peds = legs, feet

Phaseshifter = a tool that allows crossing through objects by altering the quantum nature of the matter of which they are constructed :). It is an example of a relic.

Primus = a god figure that is used mainly as figure of speech, but in fact there exists a person called Primus of a semi-godly nature of a primal creator. He can be also understood as the main force of nature (a force of good and construction, as opposed to the evil Unicron, force of destruction).

Protoflesh/protometal = the core substance embedding mechanical and functional parts of a bot, sort of a flesh, which holds things together, can feel and move, and most importantly that contains self-repair mechanisms and out of which the new components can be created in case of damage.

Recharge (also: powerdown) = sleep... sort of.

Seeker = a bot with airborne alternative mode

Servos = hands/arms

Spark = the heart and the soul. The life force of all Cybertronians. Can be in a form of a crystal or a crystallic light/energy glow structure. Residing inside the body, usually the chest.

Stasis (even worse: stasis lock) = deep unconsciousness, coma

Tentacles (also: datacables, feelers) = a tool that Soundwave has as part of his equipment or in fact very strong and sensitive limbs of his body that nobody else has - they look like quite long extendible cables with hydraulics inside and all in it allowing both to lift stuff and connect to data interfaces. Multifunctional, they do not only transmit data but are also capable of complex manual operations, including surgery through their multitool endings equipped with super-thin connectivity tendrils. They extend from the sides just above his waist and below the chest armour.

Vehicons = mass constructed Decepticon soldiers (cannon fodder).


End file.
